


bruise

by paintedpolarbear



Series: Pynch Week 2017 [3]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Blatant Disregard of the Canon Timeline, Gratuitous Hand Touching, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 06:26:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11685921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedpolarbear/pseuds/paintedpolarbear
Summary: Adam spends the night at Monmouth. This is not a night for truth, but Ronan comes dangerously close to telling it.





	bruise

Fact: Ronan’s anger is too big for his body.

 

It always is. But this is a fury unlike anything he's felt before. This burns slow, and deep, and in the core of his marrow. He doesn't know how to understand it.

 

He does know he's not sleeping tonight.

 

Adam looks small and--he’d strangle Ronan for the thought, if he knew--pathetic on Gansey’s miserable futon, bruises dark and ugly with freshness, eyes red-rimmed, a can of over-the-counter ointment sitting open on the floor. His face is empty of emotion but the worst is how meekly he’s submitting to Gansey's ministrations, silent and unmoving and extinguished. As though all the fight has already been beaten out of him.

 

For Ronan, the idea that he'd been too late after all makes him want to smash every window in the building.

 

Adam tugs his sleeve down over the hospital bracelet, an action that makes him look both younger and older at the same time. Ronan calms himself by following the motion of that hand; stares without meaning to, feels his heart rate slow at the sight of Adam’s long fingers curling in slow motion around his threadbare hem, feels ashamed of himself, can't look away.

 

Fact: Ronan does not regret anything.

 

Gansey says something about sleeping arrangements and Adam makes a facial expression for the first time in hours. It's pinched and twisted and usually the precursor to the mild explosion that always occurs when Gansey's done something to injure Adam’s pride. But it smooths itself over after a moment, and Adam only nods, and Ronan feels heartbreak and anger wash through him in tandem. He stomps to his room and slams the door, startling Chainsaw awake, before the rage that’s overtaken his whole body can overflow his skin and drown everyone nearby.

 

He doesn't scream, but he does throw shit around and make a mess, which makes him feel a little bit better.

 

The door jolts open once most of the contents of his room have been strewn across the floor. Adam peers at the wreck with a mixture of disdain, pity, and understanding that deflates Ronan. He cocks his head once, an invitation, and Adam carefully picks his way across the floor, dragging one of Gansey’s ratty blankets that he must have taken from the futon. Ronan wonders if the rest of the pile ended up on the floor. He hopes it did.

 

Adam hovers between the foot of the bed and the open window, uncertainly kicking at one of the textbooks that landed open and pages-down. It makes Ronan want to destroy something, so he throws himself on the floor next to the bed and stretches out along the creaking floorboards.

 

“Make yourself comfy, Parrish,” he says as casually as he can, pillowing one arm behind his head and folding the other over his stomach. The floor isn’t exactly comfortable, but it’s not exactly terrible, either, and in any case the massive splinter digging into his back is nothing compared to the idea of Adam not having anywhere to sleep.

 

Except Adam makes no move to actually _make himself comfy_ , looks like he might be wondering if there's even a point to being comfortable, and Ronan feels the anger reignite in his bones.

 

Fact: Adam’s pride is going to be the cause of either Ronan’s death or Ronan’s murder of someone else.

 

Ronan sits up and snarls, “You waiting for me to get you a fucking feather pillow or something?” He wishes he hadn’t. He can feel the venom in his teeth and the magma in his eyes and Adam flinches at the sparks that pour from his mouth.

 

“I can’t--” Adam looks away and wraps his arms around himself. “I won't take your _bed_.”

 

Ronan claws at his anger, forces it back down into his sinew where it won't hurt anybody but himself. Where it won't hurt Adam.

 

It's still near to boiling out of his mouth when he finally spits, “Fine, I'll take the damn bed.” He shoves the pillow and sheet on the floor and flops down on the bare mattress ungraciously, curls onto his stomach, tells himself he doesn’t even care if Adam sleeps on the floor or not. He feels the curdle of shame in his stomach at the lie.

 

After the first few burning, defiant breaths shoved through his nose into the mattress, Ronan finds himself blinking into moonlight and the silver-edged shadows of leaves on the wall. So much for not sleeping.

 

Adam’s waking up is exactly the opposite of Ronan. Where Ronan drifts leisurely through the space between sleeping and not, Adam is sudden: one moment sleeping like the dead, the next moment fully awake. Where Ronan lies paralyzed and vulnerable in the minutes after dreaming, Adam scrambles into action as soon as his eyes are open.

 

The reason Ronan knows this is that he watches Adam wake up from a nightmare.

 

One moment, he’s still, almost peaceful; then he’s gasping, levering himself upright, yanking the door open, stumbling to the kitchen/laundry/bathroom. The sound of him puking in the toilet turns Ronan’s stomach over. He huddles into the mattress as best he can, breathing through his mouth to try and quell the creeping nausea, and listens to the chorus of cicadas in the woods outside his window.

 

Fact: Ronan knows the difference between dreams and reality.

 

But Adam slips back through his bedroom door, barefoot and haloed in moonlight, bare torso shining with sweat, and Ronan wonders if his subconscious isn’t playing a cruel joke on him. His breath hitches when his eyes snag on one particularly dark bruise wrapped around the curve of a forearm, and Adam stills.

 

This is all backwards, and it hurts. There is too much fury inside him, too many raw edges, too many old feelings tangling up in his heartstrings to make sense of anything new. He doesn’t know who he’ll be if he’s extinguished, closed up, unwound. He wants desperately for someone to crack his ribcage open and rearrange his bones into something like human--and he wants desperately for no one to ever see the monster that lives in his skin and hurts everything he loves.

 

He _can’t_ love Adam Parrish. He doesn’t have the right.

 

Ronan asks, forcing weariness and delirium into his voice so he can sort-of pretend he’s been barely conscious all along: “Am I dreaming?”

 

“ _Somnium est_ ,” Adam replies from the doorway, too quickly, too perfectly, and Ronan can’t breathe. _Lie, lie, lie_.

 

Adam picks his way across the mess of Ronan’s floor, silently, like it really is a dream. Ronan hasn’t moved since waking: shirt rucked up his back, one arm curled under his stomach, the other hanging loose just over the edge of the bed. He knows Adam can hear his pulse hammering under his skin, the way his breath drags through his chest. They’re almost close enough to touch. Ronan shifts minutely, and his hand brushes Adam’s knuckles, and a shiver rockets up his spine. There’s something he’s been burning to say ever since the first time Adam had come to school with the hint of a days-old bruise poking out of his shirt collar, and it boils in his mouth.

 

“Motherfucker even looks at you ever again, I’ll kill him.” If this is a dream, then he can say it. He’s not dishonest, even in dreams, but he’s rarely forthright, either. But this is different, somehow.

 

Adam doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything for a while. “Why?” he finally whispers. Ronan, when his lungs work again, shudders a breath. The question is so much bigger than a single syllable; it falls on him with its full weight, crushing him beneath the  horrified late-night realizations of everything he’d noticed but not yet put together into a cohesive story.

 

When Ronan can move his tongue again, he manages, “He _hurt_ you.”

 

Adam meets his eye, then. The expression on his face is too complicated for Ronan to parse at this hour. “Lots of people hurt me.”

 

Ronan feels almost awake again, with the anger that surges through his belly at that. Instead of gracing that comment with an answer, he merely holds Adam’s gaze, trying to convey in his eyes and his touch what he can’t use words for. It rarely works, even in dreams, and tonight seems no different.

 

Ronan turns his wrist, making an offering of his palm. Adam’s fingertips dip into the creases of his fingers, and Ronan stifles a gasp. Someone’s ragged breath hangs between the cicadas and the rustling of the trees; Ronan can’t tell if it’s his, because he can’t feel his lungs, and he's just a little distracted by the warmth on the knife edge of scalding that's erupting from every point of skin-to-skin contact. Adam finally looks away, and his soft “why?” is barely audible.

 

“I don't hate you,” Ronan says.

 

Adam looks back at him. Quizzically, as though Ronan has presented a puzzle that he is now biologically impelled to solve. The idea of Ronan’s non-hatred (and oh, so much more than that) being new information is almost laughable. He’s only ever kept it secret from himself.

 

There's something missing, still, the silence an invitation to continue, so Ronan does. “Stop looking for reasons to think I hate you, ‘cause I don't.” Belatedly, he thinks they might still technically be in a fight, though he can't remember the details. A breath, and it's forgotten. He hates when they fight.

 

Adam snorts, “Lucky me,” and withdraws. He slips past the bed to the pile of blankets on the floor, curls into it, and falls immediately asleep. Ronan’s heart turns over and over and finally restarts.

 

His hand feels like it's on fire, and he wants it to burn and burn and burn.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Pynch Week 2017  
> Day 3: Am I Dreaming?


End file.
